Monthly Archives

March 2011

Names for whales

In that study, they focused on a coda made only by Caribbean sperm whales. It appears to signify group membership. In the latest study, published Feb. 10 in Animal Behavior, they analyzed a coda made by sperm whales around the world. Called 5R, it’s composed of five consecutive clicks, and superficially appears to be identical in each whale. Analyzed closely, however, variations in click timing emerge. Each of the researchers’ whales had its own personal 5R riff.

In other words, each sperm whale may have its own name.  For more, visit Wired, where the notion of dolphins already being proven to have the same is casually dropped in an article.

Anything you can do

You’d better believe that if BMW was going to look to the future of travel, Audi was going to not only take a peak at mobility but also the concept of how we will live in a mobile world – and then create a damned juried prize and conference series around it. It’s probably my inner SimCity lover, but the shape of tomorrow’s urban spaces has always fascinated me so I’m all for Audi’s newest project.  I am more than dubious that the car will be the catalyst for our development as a species, though.

(Autoblog via Translogic)

Humanity 1, airports 0

If only all airports had renegade pop stars in them for when the delays hit.  A little shot of sugary goodness to shore up faith in humanity while traveling could do the world a lot of good.  Since we weren’t there, this video from Death + Taxes Amber shared with me will have to do the trick.

DML Wrap Up: Stuck in DC

The DML conference wrapped up yesterday, but so did my in-room internet so I had planned on writing up my final thoughts once I arrived back home in State College.  However, I find myself now writing them up at a new Hilton here in DC.  More on that in a moment…

Day three of the conference was really a winding down sort of affair.  In talking with Shivaani Selvaraj from Penn State Harrisburg, I learned there was at least one relatively interactive session – the HTML5 workshop she attended that was put on by the Mozilla foundation.  Overall, though, it seemed that the last day of the conference was dedicated to bringing together ideas discussed throughout and doling out the appropriate thank yous to everyone who helped make it happen.

The closing keynote did offer some interesting tidbits.  Presented by Muki Hansteen-Izora, most recently of Intel’s health technology wing, the session focused on ways that technology solutions can be designed to benefit human communities and their endeavors.  From work done in the early 90s with getting inner city youth online to his recent work finding ways to use algorithms to improve the lives of aging people in their own homes, Muki embodies a way of using technology and design to give back to humanity at large.

One thing that intrigued me from the wrap up keynote was the idea of turning a resource for a specific group into a larger communal center.  Would it be possible to make the Media Commons at some campuses a space that not just students could use but also disadvantaged individuals from the local fabric?  How would something like that work, if it’s even doable?

Unfortunately, an item that did not follow me back from Long Beach was the weather.  Instead of flying in to State College tonight from Dulles, I found myself delayed, then circling the airport, then returning to Washington and suddenly attempting to find a hotel last minute and a shuttle to take me there.  I suppose it’s better than taking a prop plane (or cab) into a sudden March blizzard but I might feel a little less exhausted if I didn’t get up at 4:00 am PST before this happened!

DML Conference Day Two

The first full day of conferencing at DML 2011 kicked off today in Long Beach and it certainly gave off a much more organized air than yesterday’s upside down workshop and keynote affair. I began my day in the Novel Content track with a panel discussion of the ways in which new modes of learning are being explored at several different levels from K-12 in suburban Wisconsin to textbook publishing to higher education.  Ideas of literacy were the primary focus, chiefly the concept of integrating “knowledgeable others” into the roster of accepted classroom information sources. Of particular interest to ETS was a staggering bit of information from the K-12 realm where a new game design course garnered enough buy-in from 9th through 12th graders to merit a full eight sections during its first year.  The EGC will certainly have a large pool of interested students in the coming years if this is a national trend.

Next was a panel on living a Networked Public Life curated by danah boyd.  I was probably the most starstruck at this session and for good reason.  danah brought together researchers who were discovering ideas of persona, celebrity, access and agency from diverse groups like Bay area tech professionals, Appalachian Queer youth, Australian aborigines and Indian mobile phone users.  My big take away from this session actually came from the work of Mary Gray with LGBT young people in rural environments, though peripherally.  I realized that there were lessons to be learned that are directly applicable to how I – and the Media Commons – interfaces with rural campuses in western PA.  Specifically, how we approach and assume values imposed by urban-oriented media and media creation.  Having myself grown up in a very rural place, I do know that it’s highly important to many of these communities to be identified as local and to be part of the familiar as opposed to be an outsider or anonymous.  It will certainly be a point to remember going forward with building MC communities at our less city-centric locations.

The day rounded out with a session on Emerging Platforms that covered the OLPC efforts in the West Bank, Twitter use in Philadelphia area elementary schools, inner city learning initiatives in San Francisco and New York and research from ETS’s own Heather Hughes.  Later, I made my way to the plenary panel which prompted a feisty backchannel discussion about pop culture in education, privilege in creating learning ecosystems and licensing for music from Requiem for a Dream.

If you are starting to gather that DML is a really varied (and vaguely disjointed) conference, you are headed in the right direction with your assessment.  

DML Conference Day One: Day in Reverse

At least that’s how I’d term this first day of the Digital Media & Learning Conference in Long Beach.  After traveling for what felt like an eternity yesterday, today’s laid back pace was welcome – at least at first.  Registration started at 8:00 am on the second floor here at the Hilton with workshops following at 9:00.  Each session was paired with four others, making choosing a track somewhat difficult, as many interesting title ran concurrently.  This promoted quite a bit of room-hopping which did make the conversations between participants a bit difficult, as it seemed like quite a few attendees were plotting their escape midway through each two hour block.  

My morning session on “Designing for Designers” was a good cross section of the participant backgrounds in attendance, though.  In just my circle were two grad students studying social media and youth culture, a project manager from Google, a curriculum developer for a K-12 initiative, an media space coordinator from Singapore and a LA-based social advocacy programming producer.  I learned a lot about how each of these different people thought of the questions we were asked, which included such topics as “how to negotiate designer vs. content creator rights in communities.”  While I looked at this from a physical space perspective (Media Commons installations), the K-12 developer saw it as it related to the classroom, the Google employee saw it as online products and services, the woman from Singapore saw it as how interactive exhibits were developed, etc.  And our session organizers from MIT’s Scratch project saw it as something entirely different, making providing an answer a bit of a challenge.

The conversations held between sessions with fellow attendees made up for the awkward workshops, though and the delightful keynote from Alice Taylor – former gaming content coordinator for Channel 4 – really made the day worthwhile.  In fact, the entire welcome session this evening really connected the dots on how the day was conceived and made sense of the disparate tracks and presenters in each workshop.  I hate to be traditional about it because I know what the conference organizers were going for by structuring the day as freeform as it was, but I would almost have preferred the day’s last formal session to be its first.  In talking with other participants, I am not alone in this sentiment.

Oh well – onward into the first day of official lecture sessions tomorrow.  If they are a fraction as compelling as Alice’s, I’m going to be pleased this time tomorrow.

Some morning

Kate and I are undoubtedly going to wake up in a world where Bellatrix has learned to operate with another digit. And it’s going to be a bad morning indeed.

I want to

Well, isn’t this a lovely little car?  “What is it?” I hear you asking.  Well, friends, this is Audi’s preview of the next A3.  As a sedan.

This would be about when the sound of a record scratch would be queued.

As many of you know, I really am a fan of the hatchback/small station wagon body style.  Thus is why I own the current A3.  So seeing this wickedly sharp-looking small sedan is causing me some concerns.  I like it just fine, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not really what I thought the next A3 was going to be about.

Judging by the comments on several North American auto sites, though, it definitely is what Audi needs the A3 to be if it wants to sell them like hotcakes here.  The US readers, especially, are falling over themselves to claim that they’ll be the first one to line up, cash in hand, when the car launches.  And that’s great!

But not without my hatch.  You can call this a “notchback” or a “four dour coupé” if you must, Audi, but it’s really a sedan and you know that.  “It harkens back to the B5 series A4!” you have stated, too.  Which really only means the B8 series (current) A4 has gotten too big for its britches.

I get it.  I just don’t want it for myself.  Give me an A3 Avant, A3 Sportback, etc – just don’t leave us hanging.  It would be a shame to see Ford bringing a truly remarkable European hatchback to the States just as Audi takes theirs away.

On the positive side of things, I’m really digging the new interior: